Yes, I Said in Return, Come and Let Us Reason Together
Ut, then, what is reason? And what is it for God to reason with us? And, then, what is it for us to reason back again with God? Well, our human reason is the mental image, and the moral image, and the spiritual image of our Maker, inscribed and instamped upon the very soul of man. When God said, ‘Let us make man in our image,’ He as good as said, ‘Let us make an intelligent creature, with whom we can reason, and who can, in return, reason with us.’ And with that God breathed His own Divine life into the soul of man: in knowledge, and in righteousness, and in true holiness. Till, as the result of that, God could descend, and could walk with, and could converse with, and could reason with Adam and Eve, as a man converses and reasons with his friends.
Well, then, come this evening and hear James Fraser reasoning with God in our own language as a man reasons with his friend.
1. And first, all through his religious life Fraser is continually reasoning with God about some heavy cross in his life. ‘ What profit is there to Thee in my blood? ’ he cries. ‘ This cross,’ he cries, ‘ is the one burden of my whole life. And it is making me an old man before my time,’ he cries, ‘ And it fills my whole soul with such shame and pain sometimes, that I long for death in order to be done with it,’ he cries. His daily cross must surely have been some terrible burden that he had to bear at home; for I find him reasoning with Jesus Christ in this remarkable and arresting way: ‘ Thou canst not have forgotten Thine own daily cross in Capernaum when all Thy brethren and sisters and Thy very mother herself did not believe in Thee, but were ashamed of Thee, and of Thy doctrine and Thy life. Till Thou hadst to seek a mother, and a sister, and a brother away from home. Well, then,’ he reasoned with his Kedeemer, ‘ remember the daily cross that all that was to Thee in Galilee; and pity me, and deliver me, for all my hope is in Thee.’
But bitter and rebellious as Brea often is about his heavy cross, he is fair enough and frank enough sometimes to let us hear the other side also. For such Scriptures as this out of Job would sometimes come home to him with a great heart-quieting power: ‘ Canst Thou by searching find out God And canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ’ And this also out of Asaph: ‘ Thy way, with me, is in the sea; and Thy path in the great waters.’ But there was no Scripture that had more weight with Fraser than this out of Paul: ‘ O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor? ’ Fraser went to the Epistle to the Romans for his justification every night he lived, and it was but reasonable, he said, that God should be let take His own way in the sanctification of His justified servant, as that sanctification also is written in the Romans. And even more than Paul’s great doxology, there is an experimental passage in Peter that made Fraser’s cross to ‘sprout wings’ sometimes; just as Samuel Rutherford’s Aberdeen cross sometimes sprouted wings to him, ‘ Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God,’ said the Apostle Peter to Fraser, ‘ that He may exalt you in due time. For the God of all grace, after you have suffered a while, will make you perfect, will stablish you, will strengthen you, and will settle you.’ Peter pressed that Scripture home upon Fraser till he actually came to fear, sometimes, that his cross might be removed from off his life before it had finished its work of sanctification and sub¬ mission in his heart. And till Fraser so washed his face, and so anointed his head, under his cross, that he deceived even Thomas Ross of Tain, who was not easily deceived in such spiritual matters.
2. And, then, a whole lifetime of unanswered prayer: that was another of James Fraser’s continual controversies and expostulations with God. Fraser had years upon years and volumes upon volumes of unanswered prayers lying spread out before the mercy seat. And never so much as one word had ever been sent down in answer to those importunate prayers of his. ‘ The eighth ground,’ that sometimes made this so inward and so intricate man to doubt the truth of his conversion was the thousands upon thousands of his accumulated and still unanswered prayers. But then, some reasonings such as these would some¬ times come home to Fraser with great power and with great comfort. ‘ Lifelong prayer, if need be, is my business,’ he would say to himself; ‘ whereas, the times, and the ways, of His answers — all that is God’s business.’ Again, he would reason with himself, and would say; ‘ At any rate, it is good for me to keep drawing near to God in all such matters. And that even if He were never to answer me one word in all this present life. And on one despairing and sinking occasion I find him reasoning thus: ‘ When God has given a mouth, and has filled that mouth with hunger, is He not bound to come and fill that mouth with suitable meat? ’ And again: ‘ God never denies His people without having a good reason for so doing. And sometimes He shows them His good reasons: as in Psalm lxvi. 18, and in 2 Cor. xii. 8 and 9.’ And this went on, till Fraser died on his knees before the mercy-seat, and was translated to that land and that life where all his prayers were answered with compound interest.
3. And, then, again, though he had been ‘ well left,’ as we say, and was to the end the laird of Brea in the Black Isle, at the same time he suffered such ill-usage from some of his relatives, and had such severe losses in the matter of money, that he had no little reasoning with God what all that hardship and impoverishment might mean in God’s mind and purpose towards him. But there are suitable reasonings concerning all that, and there are shining examples of faith and trust in some Scripture saints, examples that are surely written for the learning of both Highland lairds and High¬ land tenants in their most adverse circumstances, and in their greatest impoverishments. The prophet Habakkuk, for one, would seem to have been a highland husbandman under a great impoverish¬ ment in the land of Israel. I thought of Habakkuk the other day when I was passing through one of our northern counties and saw the corn crops of whole farms still lying under rain and snow. I saw whole farms with not a stook standing upright in the fields and not a stack roofed over in the corny ards. But with all that sad spectacle around me I did not dare to charge God foolishly. For this came with great power and comfort to my mind, that there is not a drop of rain, nor a ray of sunshine, nor a breath of wind, without our Father. And all that led me to ask, and with a great importunity, that those farmers might be enabled to walk through their rotting fields singing Habakkuk’s great song which was written for all believing farmers under a bad harvest. You all have his splendid song by heart:
‘ What though no flowers the fig-tree clothe, Though vines their fruit deny,
The labour of the olive fail,
And fields no meat supply?
Though from the fold, with sad surprise.
My flock cut off I see;
Though famine pine in empty stalls.
Where herds were wont to be?
Yet in the Lord will I be glad.
And glory in His love;
In Him I ’ll joy, who will the God
Of my salvation pi-ove.
God is the Treasure of my soul.
The source of lasting joy;
A joy which want shall not impair.
Nor death itself destroy.’
What a compensation it was to that heart-broken husbandman and flock-master in Israel to be able to hand down that triumphant song to thousands of impoverished saints like himself! And what a ’ compensation to all our highland and lowland farmers to be enabled to sing it at family worship, and in their own hearts, amid all their earthly losses I And what a song for ourselves amid all our crosses and losses and impoverishments of all kinds I
4. Fraser had many more reasonings and remonstrances than these. 13ut I shall end to-night with the sorest and the saddest and the most unanswerable of them all, which was this: ‘ Why does the God of truth and of holiness let my sanctiflcation remain so slow, and so standstill, and so liable to such backslidings? ’ From the day of his conversion when a student in Edinburgh down to the day of his death, Fraser’s secret journal is full of that darkest and most painful of all his reasonings and remonstrances. These are some of his words written out of an ink-bottle overflowing with tears and blood: ‘ I thought every creature to be happy but myself. Meat, drink, and company were all so many snares and crosses to me, because of the sin¬ fulness of my heart.’ Till, in the holy agony of his heart, he would actually reason and remonstrate with God in this way: ‘ I thought that I was promised a new and a clean heart! I believed, and I rested on what I had read. And I had read this out of the prophet, and I was simple enough to take it all as spoken to me — this: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you shall keep My commandments and do them.” But, instead of that,’ remonstrated Fraser, ‘ my heart is fouler to-day than ever it was before, and fouler every new day than it was yesterday. I find such a bad heart in my bosom continually that I cry to God every day under it, and say to Him, “Didst Thou ever even begin to fulfil the prophet’s promises to me? Or, did he go beyond his com¬ mission and so deceive me?” So I was wont to reason with God, in my misery and in my wretchedness.’
‘ But,’ he proceeds in the intricate history of his heart, ‘ as I gave myself to searching out the mind of God in the sanctification of His servants; and as I read and inquired, deeper and deeper, into the recorded experiences of those great saints of His who were placed under a signal sanctification, I came on such testimonies and assurances as these — till I copied them out for my own use and for the use of all who need them — such things as these: “The more true holiness, the more tragic the sense of sin.” Again, “The honest desire to be holy is our best holiness in this life.” Again, “The little fruit which we have in holiness, it is, God knoweth, corrupt and unsound: we put no confidence at all in it: but our continual prayer must be that God would bear with our infirmities, and would pardon our offences.” ’ And he took this also out of Samuel Rutherford, and had it written over again on the tables of his own heart — this: ‘ Sinfulness rages far more in the godly than it does in the ungodly.’ And this out of a son of Luther: ‘ Our sin becomes bitter exactly in the degree that our sanctification advances.’ James Fraser did not live in the days of Thomas Chalmers, else he would have copied this also off the blackboard of the school of Skirling: ‘ The longer the diameter of light, the larger the circumferenee of darkness.’ Nor had he this hymn, which we are so happy to have:
And they who fain would serve Thee best
Are conscious most of wrong within.’
Fraser had a little book full of these things which he carried about in his vest pocket. After which entries, he sets down these supplements and seals of his own: ‘ By all that God makes me to reason and to admit that there is an unrenewed part in every man, and a part that still inclines to sin and tends down to death. And hence, be not too much cast down, if thou find much remaining evil within thee. But put the saddle on the right horse — ix. attribute all thy evil to thyself, and all thy good to God’s Holy Spirit.’ And he has this, also, which makes me think that among all the good books which so helped Fraser, Dante had found his way north to Brea — this: ‘ God’s dealings with His saints always begin with tragedies, but they always end in comedies. Because the latter end of such men is always holiness and peace.’
But to conclude for to-night. As the spiritual life went on with this so inward and so intricate man he came to understand and to acquiesce and to exonerate and to praise, when in his raw-headed days he had reasoned and reclaimed and remonstrated and rebelled. I will wind up with some of his own ripe and wise words: ‘ Sanctification,’ he says, ‘ is but sparingly let out to me. But this is still to humble me and to make me to long for heaven and its perfect and everlasting holiness. I comfort myself with this that I have the earnest: and an earnest is always but small in respect of the full stock. But, then, a little arles the bargain as well as much. And thus I get these directions: To be a humble man: to live on the fulness of Christ; to long for heaven, and to be weary of the sinfulness of this earth: to remember that the rich are sent empty away, while the poor are made welcome, and are always blessed: and to do good to other men, because he that Avatereth others shall not be let die of thirst.’
Now, my brethren, if I were to venture to add one word of my own experience to all that of Fraser it would be this: that all the sin, and shame, and agony of soul, connected with my own sanctification, is all ordained to me, I daily see, in order that I may more and more exalt and magnify Jesus Christ as my alone sanctification, as well as my alone justification. My daily experience of the sinfulness of my own soul leads me every day deeper and deeper into the Person and the Work of Christ, as Paul alone preaches Christ and His work to me. And as all evangelical and spiritually minded men have received Christ, and have more and more rested on Him, and more and more looked to Him for all their holiness of heart, as well as for all their peace of conscience. The whole magnificent economies of creation and redemption, of grace and of glory, are all ordained of the Father for the glory of His Son. And the fulness of the Son’s glory will be the fulness of our salvation,and nothing else will. When God had fully revealed His Son in Paul, the apostle went on to add the second of the Galatians and the third of the Philippians to the seventh of the Romans: which same sequence, I feel sure, will be your experience and mine as well as his.